Sim City-Sufferers Earn Themselves a Free Game and More Apologies

Those who've spent the last few days trying, failing and trying again to play the new Sim City on PC are about to be rewarded for their patience, with publisher EA dishing out an unspecified free PC game as consolation.

The Amazon one-star review scandal and generally negative feedback about the game wherever you look online has pushed EA into action, with the game maker putting the metropolitan crisis down to a simple lack of resources, saying: "...a lot more people logged on than we expected. More people played and played in ways we never saw in the beta."

It then explained how it's trying to speed things up and make the always-online sim actually playable from now on:

"OK, we agree, that was dumb, but we are committed to fixing it. In the last 48 hours we increased server capacity by 120 percent. It’s working – the number of people who have gotten in and built cities has improved dramatically. The number of disrupted experiences has dropped by roughly 80 percent."

Plus, on March 18, EA will allow owners of activated copies of the game to download one free title from the maker's portfolio, a move it describes as: "...kind of like buying a present for a friend after you did something crummy."

In it most recent tech update, EA now claims it has "reduced game crashes by 92% from day one," thanks to increasing capacity and making some vague optimisations and updates. So it ought to nearly be properly playable. [EA via Ars]